"The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast, The slow one now will later be fast, As the present now will later be past, The order is rapidly fading And the first one now will later be last, for The Times They Are A-Changin' "--Bob Dylan, 1963

Tell him to give me commit access to fontconfig. He stopped responding to my multiple pings and other messages a while ago.

The last fontconfig release happened over a year ago. I've been hacking on fontconfig and reviewing and committing patches submitted by others since August, and my tree has accumulated 190 commits so far, and touches about 7000 lines of code.

My tree fixes more than half of the bugs open in upstream bugzilla. It also includes many many performance improvements. Consumes less memory. Has a FcFontSort() call four times faster. And adds many new features as well as support for many new languages.

It also adds features needed for automatic font installation using PackageKit. This feature is included in Fedora 11, which means my tree is shipped in F11. Other distros however are waiting for a tarball without "behdad" in the version tag before updating.

In the mean time, if you use and enjoy GNOME, here's a few different ways you can support it:

If you have not already, opt in the Adopt a Hacker monthly subscription. It's the easiest way to contribute to GNOME in a sustained and affordable way. Like they say, what are you waiting for? :)

If you prefer one-time donations, you can do that too. Remember, GNOME is a registered non-profit and donations are tax-deductible in the US.

You can also support GNOME by letting your friends know about it. Just go to this page and post one of the badges to your blog or website. Thanks in advance!

Finally, as a special offer, the first person to donate to GNOME in the Philanthropist level ($1200 or more) will receive the following framed art work with an engraved plaque recognizing your contribution:

(Click to enlarge)

The frame is 13"x18" and comes with over 4GB of ram! Perfect for a GNOME-Friendly office. If you attend GUADEC this year, it will be handed to you by the GNOME Foundation board of directors there. If not, we'll make other arrangements. Contact me at behdad-gnome-org to claim. First come first serve!

If you travel frequently, chances are you've seen many of the HSBC "Your Point of View" airport ads already. Everytime I'm boarding an aircraft or getting out of mine I enjoy them and want to blog about them, but by the time I have internet access I've already forgotten.

So I was delighted to finally look them up and find them here. They are truly brilliant. Here's a couple favorites of mine: